Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

May 31, 2009

This week's issue of Businessweek has a solid article about how Yahoo! is trying to avoid a repeat of its China mistakes in Vietnam. Yahoo! 360 is very popular among Vietnamese bloggers, but Yahoo! has decided not to host the service out of Vietnam, opting instead to host the Vietnamese Yahoo! 360 in Singapore. Yahoo!, along with Google and Microsoft, is a member of the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder initiative launched last Fall aimed at upholding principles of free expression and privacy in the Internet and telecommunications industries. All three corporate signatories are now applying the GNI principles to decisions they make about operations not only in Vietnam, but in many other markets. In South Korea, after a law recently went into effect requiring the collection of users' real names and ID numbers, and handover of user information to the South Korean government upon request, Google chose to disable video uploads and comments on the Korean version of YouTube, recommending that South Korean users use other international versions of YouTube - not subject to South Korean jurisdiction - instead.

It has been more than half a year since the Global Network Initiative on free expression and privacy was launched with somefanfare as well as some criticism. The main headline: Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft made a public commitment to free expression and privacy, signing on to a set of common principles and agreeing to be held accountable through a system of reporting, evaluation and monitoring. I've been involved with the process of forming GNI since 2006. It wasn't easy: it took a year before the participants were even ready to admit publicly that they were sitting down together with human rights groups, free speech activists, socially responsible investment funds, and academics to create a set of principles which they would then be held accountable for upholding. Now the big challenge is to recruit more companies. The organization's structure is still being set up, and the search for an executive director is underway. The GNI is beginning to issue public statements: In March the group expressed concern about lack of transparency and accountability in the way that various governments around the world have been censoring YouTube. The GNI more recently reiterated the commitment of participating companies to "continue to take steps to minimize the impact on users and the public and to encourage governments to protect the right to freedom of expression."

Since the initiative's launch, GNI members have discussed the organization and its objectives in several public fora. At the bottom of this post I've embedded the video from a GNI panel at a Berkeley conference on human rights, technology and new media. Watch it for a discussion of the initiative's goals, activities, and motivations in great detail. Last Wednesday I moderated a panel about GNI at the 7th Chinese Internet Research Conference held at UPenn. It was live-blogged by Ethan Zuckerman and by Lokman Tsui. Conversations leading to the GNI's formation were motivated in large part by the fact that the three participating companies were hauled in to congress and yelled at in February 2006 for their roles - to various degrees - in complying with Chinese government demands for censorship and surveillance. But all members of the GNI (including myself) insist that while its formation may have been spurred by events in China, this is a truly global initiative: there is no country on earth where companies aren't under some kind of pressure from government to do things that infringe on individual civil liberties. The GNI is meant to be a set of global guidelines for how to handle these pressures - from China to the U.S. to anywhere in between.

That said, the GNI panel at last Wednesday's Chinese Internet Research Conference was a great opportunity to get feedback from Chinese bloggers, activists, academics, and others. Isaac Mao talked about his open letter to Google , written two years ago but never responded to. He believes that global companies should do more than just try to minimize harm: he argued that they could do more to actively help to support an independent discourse on the Chinese Internet. They are already doing some things, like enabling https on Google Reader, Google Docs, and so forth, but he believes they could do more to make their blogging tools accessible, and to help China's independent bloggers support themselves through Google Adsense. When asked whether he thought that the GNI was too much of a "Western" thing, he responded that the values it espouses are universal. He did express concern however that the structure of GNI seems to be geared towards large companies, and wondered whether startups had the staff or capacity to join.

"Michael Anti" (real name: Zhao Jing), the blogger who was censored by Microsoft back in late 2005, was also in the room. I called on him to comment. He said that even though he was unhappy with Microsoft for having deleted his blog, he disagreed with human rights groups who believe that Western internet companies should pull out of China in order to avoid all compromise. "Chinese civil society really depends on Google services," he said. Without Google groups, docs, gmail, and so forth, he believes it would be even harder for people to discuss things the government doesn't want discussed. That said, however, like Isaac, Michael believes that Western companies owe it to Chinese Internet users to help them out as much as possible. His message to companies: "When you do business in China, we exchange our freedom to help you succeed. You should do something for us in return because we have chosen to ignore your compromise with the government." Both he and Isaac believe that in the long run these companies will be rewarded with Chinese users' respect and loyalty. Google's Bob Boorstin seemed to be taking it all on board. He did point out that Google Grants (in-kind advertising for non-profit organizations) are now available in China.

Ang Peng-hwa of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore observed that while the Chinese are not "genetically predisposed to censor" it would also be unrealistic to expect that the whole world will adopt an American-style "first amendment:" different societies are going to arrive at different balances between civil liberty protections and the desire to maintain stability and security, and fight crime. That said, he also thinks that a global initiative supporting free expression is worthy, because in countries that censor heavily, civil society is weak making home-grown initiatives difficult if not impossible. But global efforts need to be done in a realistic way. He suggested that the GNI might want to emphasize the issue of third party liability: in some countries (like the U.S.) web services that host blogs, wikis, and other user-generated content aren't held legally liable for content posted by their users, making it harder for governments to force them to censor. In places like China (and many other countries), companies are held responsible for everything their users upload. Focusing on best-practice legal frameworks may be less ideologically explosive and easier to discuss in countries where terms like "free speech" are ideologically loaded.

A big weakness of the GNI, as members themselves have acknowledged, is that so far only American companies have joined. The hope is to recruit European and Asian companies over the coming year. As Boorstin pointed out last week, all companies should recognize that doing good and making money are compatible. Joining GNI is a public commitment to users that you're not just going to talk the talk, but you're going to walk the walk in a transparent, accountable, and credible way.

August 14, 2008

China's system of filtering websites by blocking web addresses and keywords of overseas websites has come to be known as the "Great Firewall." (No that is not it's official name - I believe the term was first coined by some frustrated bloggers.) But the GFW, for short, is only a small part of Chinese Internet censorship.

Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall is only one small part of Chinese Internet censorship."

My Op-ed in today's Asian Wall Street Journal, The Chinese Censorship Foreigners Don't See, is an effort to get people to get beyond what Internet scholar Lokman Tsui describes as a Western fixation on "Iron Curtain 2.0" which blinds most Western observers to the realities of the Chinese Internet - and to China more generally, for that matter.

Back in June I wrote a post explaining how we need to get beyond the "wall" metaphor in order to understand Chinese Internet censorship properly. People at this year's Chinese Internet Research Conference suggested "Net Nanny" or even "Hydroelectric Management" are better metaphors for how speech is controlled on the Chinese Internet. But they're just not as sexy-sounding somehow, and lack the same nifty Soviet-era-with-Chinese-flavor overtones.

While I'm at it, another pet peeve. Repeat after me: "The Great Firewall does not equal the Golden Shield Project. The Great Firewall is only a subset of the Golden Shield."

The filtering system we call the Great Firewall is only a very small part of the official Golden Shield Project (pdf), the official goverment name for a a national initiative spanning digital surveillance, better communications and data sharing among law enforcement and security agencies, data mining, general use of ICT to improve Chinese law enforcement and national security - as broadly defined by all the relevant departments, ministries, etc. Censorship is one small part of the digital efforts to protect "national security" from the perspective of those in charge.

But that's for another long rant some other time, I digress. Since my WSJ op-ed was limited to 600 words and could not contain my usual blog links, screenshots, quotations, and so forth, I thought I'd share a few more details here that relate to the examples of censorship I gave in the article.

In the piece I described the results of some tests I conducted this week as part of my research project looking at how Chinese blog-hosting companies censor their users' content.

Over the past week I've been posting a variety of Olympics-related content onto accounts set up on 16 different Chinese blog-hosting platforms to see what content gets censored, by which platforms, and how. A small band of badly-paid masochists and I have been doing these kinds of tests on and off since the beginning of the year - once we've got enough results to draw conclusions, I'll do some follow-on research then write up my findings for an academic paper. So far, I'm finding censorship on blog-hosting services to be common and wide-ranging and there is huge variation on who censors what. Many services over-compensate to stay out of trouble, which combined with inexact automated censorship systems, results in frequent censorship of things you can find on Xinhua.

In the article, I cite two tests, one on Sina and another on the Baidu blogging system. Here's the text I posted, taken from the BBC Chinese website (which is not currently blocked by the Great Firewall at least in some parts of China) about the knife attack against two Americans and their Chinese guide in Beijing over the weekend, and which was almost entirely based on Chinese state media reports:

You'd think that something like this wouldn't be censored given that the GFW isn't blocking it, and it's not saying anything beyond what you can find around the Chinese web from news websites. But you'd be wrong.

Sina and Baidu were playing their censorship system so conservative that Sina took down my post after a few hours and Baidu wouldn't even let me publish it. Here's the error message at the url where my Sina post had briefly resided (click image for full error message page):

Yahoo! China censored it too (click image to see original error page):

Lots of apologies and links to various help pages, but no hint that the reason why you're landing on this error page might be because the post was censored.

Even more amusing, this Xinhuanet article, about President Hu Jintao's pre-Olympics pep talk telling everybody to "put on a good Olympics" was censored by iFeng (the blog platform of Phoenix TV), and Mop (a property of Oak Pacific, recipient of much U.S. venture capital). Mop gave me this error message: "Apologies, your article has been put into the blog recycling station, please correct it then publish again."

I find it pretty common for blog-hosting platforms to censor Communist Party propaganda material about Chinese leaders. Do the regulators instructing them assume that all mentions of China's leaders are likely to be negative or sarcastic?

Then, many are. Take the political joke censored by China mobile, which I also mentioned in my article. Here's blogger "deerfang"'s description of what happened:

Last night, my friend were telling me some political jokes that were circulating through cell text messaging. The joke involves current Chinese president and Mao. He showed me story on his phone and tried to forward it to my phone. Strange thing happened. My phone received the message but in blank saying “Missing Text”. We realize these kind of text messages might be censored now in China because of certain keywords. The one my firend received were back in May. We tried to send the joke a few more times and also tried someone else’ phone, but never succeeded.

Here is the original joke (third paragraph down), which, in addition to doing the rounds on mobile SMS has also done the rounds on the web - censorship is patchy enough that if you're taken down in one place you can usually find a home for the material somewhere else - though it may be in a corner of the web where fewer people surf. The joke doesn't translate very well, but the gist of it is that President Hu Jintao, at his wits' end about what to do with all the crises happening around the nation, goes to see Mao - lying preserved under glass in his mausoleum - and asks for advice. Mao offers to trade places with Hu and to go out and kick some foreign behind, frighten all the foreigners and put them in their place by making them take a ridiculous series of Chinese tests. Or something like that. It's (slightly) better in Chinese...

The point is, nothing revolutionary or particularly brilliant in there. I've heard much crazier and nastier political jokes - like the one about Li Peng switching private parts with Deng Xiaoping at Deng's wake, or the one about Deng and Thatcher doing the nasty.

The joke was censored on China Mobile most likely because it mentions Hu Jintao, which they have probably entered as a keyword for blocking.

That implies an assumption by China Mobile that any Chinese person who mentions their president on mobile SMS is more likely than not to have bad things to say...

June 25, 2008

Ever since June 3rd, visitors to 56.com, one of China's video sharing "YouTube clones," have been unable to access any other part of the site, other than this message below claiming that the site is undergoing "maintenance" and a "major upgrade:"

Due to the vast quantity of material, the message says that the process will require "a certain amount of time." Users' forgiveness is requested.

Another YouTube clone, Tudou, had majorproblems earlier this year but is now back in operation after what insiders said was a major upgrading of their internal censorship systems so that sensitive video (sexual, political, and perhaps some copyright-violating) could be adequately vetted.

On Monday, the Washington Post asked whether 56.com's troubles are the "beginning of Chinese government taketown of video sites?"

According to a new report by the China Internet Network Information Center, as many as 160 million Chinese now watch online video. It's turning into a powerful mass medium. Thus it's not surprising that the propaganda authorities want to try and control it the way they control broadcast television. Jeremy Goldkorn, Loretta Chao and others have reported on the list of 247 websites whch the State Administration of Radio Film and Television (SARFT) has officially "approved to host Internet audio-visual programs" in China. 56.com, Tudou, and another YouTube clone Youku are conspicuously absent from the list.

In a long and very detailed analysis, Eric Eldon at Venturebeat has further thoughts about the fate of 56.com, whose investors include Sequoia Capital among many other Silicon Valley big names:

But even if the government did shut down the site, the move may not be a concern for neither rivals nor rival investors. The most recent rumor I’ve heard going around in China is that 56.com wasn’t adequately censoring videos about the recent, devastating earthquake in China’s Sichuan province from the site.

Both Youku and Tudou have assured me that they’re very careful about following government regulations, saying that because they are the largest sites in China, they face the most scrutiny from the government before getting approval. Both say they work closely with the government to ensure that content is compliant. The fact that Tudou only went down for a day or so in March, and that Youku went down for only an hour on June 4th (both incidents were also officially called technology problems) suggests that they are keeping the government satisfied.

But he also wonders if there are other factors at play:

...besides possible earthquake-related censorship, perhaps it is 56.com’s place at the intersection of video and social networking apps that could be behind its downtime. Could it be that 56.com has run out of money, or gotten close enough to running out of money that its investors have pulled the plug?

After going over all the details of the technologies and investors behind Tudou, Youku, and 56.com, he concludes:

...Even all these things considered, it’s hard for me to believe that such marquee technology investors would want to shut it down. If nothing else, the combination of the company’s video and social networking services must one day be worth something more than they are now, if one has even a relatively low expectations for either category.

Maybe it’s just a case of 56.com having less stringent filters than its peers in hopes of drawing in more traffic, in which case it might come back once it gets in line with the others.

But the company and its investors have not commented on why it has been offline for nearly three weeks, and the longer it goes offline, the less likely it seems it will ever return. Even if the investors haven’t shut it down yet, the downtime may be the fatal blow against the company’s efforts to raise another, almost certainly necessary funding round.

At the Chinese Internet Research Conference, BDA's Duncan Clark gave a presentation about the regulatory challenges faced by anybody hoping to make money in Chinese online video. See his presentation here, the live-blogged summary here, and the WSJ blog writeup here. In his paper, heres's what Duncan to say about the censorship mechanisms that online video companies are putting into place, with help from Silicon Valley VC funds:

Another expense line which weighs heavily on Chinese video sites finances – and their management time - is content filtering. Video sites in China have to adhere to a very strict – yet ill-defined - standard of what content is permissible. In discussions with various online video sites contacted by BDA, company executives were at pains to stress how effective they were in filtering content, either through the dedication of superior numbers of personnel or through the deployment of more sophisticated technology – for example searching for offensive key words (to find a video amidst the torrent of content consumers need to start with a key word) or randomly sampling frames of content and detecting offensive uploads.

Whatever the efficacy of these systems, as the volume of content uploaded increases the burden of hosting and filtering will inevitably increase.

All Internet companies operating inside China on which either feature user generated content or on which user-generated content might appear - Youtube-like video, photo-sharing, blogging, bulletin boards, forums, social networking sites, search engines etc. - are all required to employ teams of people and write internal software programs to keep politically objectionable content off their sites. (I've written about these systems here, here, and here; Reporters Without Borders last year published an accurate report about the whole process here, and my colleague David Bandurski wrote about the regulatory bodies behind the process here.)

One of the interesting things about the system of official regulations, warnings, and punishments is that they are vague: companies are not told very specifically what to do and how - rather, they're warned they'll be in big trouble if they're not good enough at controlling content on an ever-changing list of subjects. As a result, the censorship systems put in place by Chinese Internet companies vary wildly in their thoroughness or in some cases, over-thoroughness. At the Chinese Internet Research Conference at the beginning of our roundtable on Corporate Action and Responsibility I showed a few slides containing screenshots from a research project I'm currently running in which I and my small team are testing to see how various Chinese blog-hosting companies are censoring their users' content. Across 17 different blog-hosting services, there is little consistency so far in our testing in terms of what gets censored or how. Not surprisingly, when we posted a few paragraphs from the Dalai Lama's open letter to the Chinese people, 10 out of 17 services censored it. Some wouldn't allow us to post it at all, others marked it as "waiting for approval" which never came, and others took it down soon after posting. Tianya (which receives Google investment), wouldn't allow us to post. Here's what the error message looked like (click to enlarge):

Other services have their censorship systems so thoroughly automated, they're even censoring state propaganda articles. When we posted the first few paragraphs of this article from Xinhua about President Hu Jintao's visit to a coal mine during the snowstorms and energy crisis in January, two of the 15 blog-hosting services censored it. Mop.com wouldn't even allow us to post:

...and Blogbus put *** over the President's name.

What this shows is that companies are making different choices about how they censor...some more ham-fisted, some lighter, and some heavier, than others.

The data presented in this report indicates that there is not a
comprehensive system - such as a list issued by the Chinese government
- in place for determining censored content. In fact, the evidence
suggests that search engine companies themselves are selecting the
specific web sites to be censored raising the possibility of over
blocking as well as indicating that there is significant flexibility in
choosing how to implement China’s censorship requirements.

So what does this mean? Does this mean that there is room for companies to make choices about what they censor and how they censor it? And that perhaps some of these choices can lead toward at least greater transparency and accountability as far as the user is concerned? Those are some of the questions I asked our conference panel.

Isaac Mao said he thinks that companies that treat their users more intelligently and with greater respect will do better in the long run - especially when it comes to user privacy, but also in terms of censorship. (Although as Deborah Fallows pointed out in an earlier session, survey data indicates that Chinese users appear to have a hight tolerance for censorship.)

Duncan Clark pointed out that the business culture in China forces companies to do whatever necessary to keep the authorities off your back - which means doing things like political censorship and cooperating with police investigations of dissidents that cause American companies to get hauled into Congress and yelled at. This pressure on domestic Chinese companies - and thus pressure on foreign brands that try to compete with them - is unlikely to change until these Chinese companies start having major business interests overseas in markets where they need to gain trust and respect of users who are not as tolerant of censorship and more likely to yell about civil liberties than their Chinese users are. Then, Duncan said, maybe they'll push back harder against Chinese government demands.

Joshua Rozenzweig of the Duihua Foundation was of the view that this is going to be a long hard slog, and that it will be difficult for much to change until China acquires a truly independent judiciary and legal system that serves citizens and their rights rather than the government's interests. But he also pointed out that conversations about these issues are much easier to have when you approach these problems as global problems: that we have problems of governments pressuring companies to infringe upon individual rights everywhere on the globe. If people in China feel that they're being lectured by Westerners from a position of moral superiority, they won't be interested in listening, even if they might agree with some of what you have to say.

I read the panel a quote from a recent article titled China's Holistic Censorship Regime, written for the Far Eastern Economic Review by an anonymous businessperson: "Ultimately, to succeed in China, businesses must assume the goals of the Communist Party as their own."

Isaac Mao disagreed. Why? Because, he said, nobody knows what the Chinese Communist Party's goals are: the CCP doesn't make them clear, nor are the companies clear what the CCP really wants of them. At any rate, there's no monolithic "they" who express a unified "goal." Depending on which ministry or regulatory body you're dealing with at any given time - and which individual at which provincial or city level you happen to be dealing with - the message about what the "goals" are and what the priorities should be varies tremendously. It's the vagueness and uncertainty, Duncan agreed, which makes companies nervous and thus causes them to over-compensate, constantly trying to second-guess the regulators. How do you go up against a headless monster like this and get it to change? Or how do you convince compannies that they can change the way that they choose to respond to this headless monster, so that rather than encouraging it to be even more arbitrary and outrageous, they might instead respond in ways that might encourage it to evolve in a direction more compatible with rule of law and respect for individual rights?

Josh of Duihua made a very important point: if you want to help encourage or lobby for a particular kind of change, first you need to figure out who in the government bureaucracy would benefit from that change. You need to figure out which businesses and other economic interests would profit from that change and how. You figure out who their opponents are in the bureaucracy and how it all fits in to the various inter-ministerial, inter-regional, and other power struggles. Then you will have a better idea of who is most likely to want to listen to you with an open mind, and who might even find your information useful to their own agendas.

June 20, 2008

Earlier today in Beijing, Chinese President Hu Jintao did a webcast with staff of "Strong China Forum," an online forum run by the People's Daily Online. See the English transcript here and the Chinese here.

More than 300 questions for President Hu were posted in advance by forum members. He only answered two softballs. One thread on Tianya reflects some people's dismay that the whole thing was "over as soon as it started." There has been some web chatter saying that not many people were able to get into that chatroom. The questions at Strong China Forum are supposed to be here, but so far I've been unable to access the page from my internet connection in London, even when I use a Chinese proxy. Fortunately the folks at China Digital Times got on, and provided this summary:

"Some complained, “Old Hu, lots of government money has been wasted by officials on feasts. Why don’t you stop it?” ” Why haven’t our salaries been increased while the prices of everything else are skyrocketing? “; “The stock market and housing market are collapsing. It is hard to find a job…”"

Some asked about policy and political issues, including some tricky ones: “What do you think of Taiwan’s democratization?” ; “How would you deal with wrong but well-intentioned opinions on the Internet?”

Despite the whole thing being gimmicky and generally content-free, I found the final part of Hu's webcast interesting:

Hu Jintao: We pay great attention to suggestions and advice from our netizens. We stress the idea of "putting people first" and "governing for the people." With this in mind, we need to listen to people's voices extensively and pool the people's wisdom when we take actions and make decisions. The web is an important channel for us to understand the concerns of the public and assemble the wisdom of the public.

Forum: Thanks you, Mr. General-Secretary. Dear friends, General-Secretary Hu Jintao's communication must conclude now as he has other things to do.

Hu Jintao: It is a pity that I cannot communicate more with the netizens today due to the time constraint. However, I will read and think carefully the comments and questions posted for me by our netizens.

As the BBC put it: "Mr Hu's appearance on a chat forum suggests that the party at least knows the importance of listening to the public." (UPDATE: More from Danwei.org here.)

As it happens, I just finished reading a book by Zheng Yongnian of Nottingham University titled Technological Empowerment: The Internet, State, and Society in China. It's an academic book which means that it costs an outrageous US$50 and is also dry and not written in a particularly entertaining style. But for anybody trying to make sense of how the Internet is changing Chinese politics and society, it's well worth a read if you can afford it or get somebody else (your institution's library or your company) to pay for it.

Zheng argues that while China is making no meaningful progress toward democratization, the Internet is nonetheless causing "political liberalization." The Internet in China, he believes, is enabling greater public deliberation about policy (within limits to be sure) as well as forcing the leadership to be more responsive to public opinion - or at least that segment of public opinion that is able to appear on the part of the Internet that you can access in China, which despite its limitations still gives Chinese citizens a conduit of expression that was not available before. Zheng points to several cases where public reaction to and discussion of information posted online led to policy changes: outrage over Sun Zhigang's death in detention led to abolition of the "Custody and Repatriation" system; outrage over the detention of outspoken rural business tycoon Sun Dawu created pressure on provincial governments and the central government to change policy practices that discriminate against the private sector. During the SARS outbreak, information, concerns (and wild rumors) posted on the Internet and sent through mobile SMS eventually broke down government attempts at tight information control. He also points to wildly unsuccessful cases: use of the Internet by the outlawed FLG and the opposition China Democracy Party to criticize the regime and call for an end to one-party rule by the CCP. What's the difference?

Zheng says that the difference between success and failure comes down to an online movement's strategy and objectives. The most spectacularly unsuccessful online movements (and the ones leading to the most brutal crackdowns both online and off) tend to advocate what he calls the "exit" option - i.e. that the Chinese people should exit one-party CCP rule, or that a particular group or territory might have the right to do so. The Chinese bureaucracy and leadership contains reformists and conservatives. However "when the regime is threatened by challengers, the soft-liners and hard-liners are likely to stand on the same side and fight the challengers." Successful online movements in China tend to use what he calls the "voice" option, or what other political scientists call the "cooperation option." The key to a successful effort to change government policy in China is to find a way to give reformist leaders and bureaucrats at all levels of government the ammunition they need to win out in arguments and power-struggles with their hard-line conservative colleagues. Reformists can point to what's being said in the chatrooms and blogs and in the edgier newspapers and argue that without change, there will be more unrest and public unhappiness - thus change is required to save the regime. Zheng writes: "the voice does not aim to undermine or overthrow the state. Instead, through a voice mechanism, the state can receive feedback from social groups to respond to state decline and improve its legitimacy."

In a similar vein, at the Chinese Internet Research Conference last week Jiang Min, an Assistant Professor at UNC-Charlotte, presented a paper titled Authoritarian Deliberation: Public Deliberation in China. Her argument centers around the idea - oft overlooked by Western punditry - that it's possible to have substantial amount of public deliberation about policy within an authoritarian state. Different authoritarian states have different levels of deliberation, and it's no substitute for the "democratic deliberation" in democratic countries when it comes to the ability of the governed to influence their government. Thus political deliberation needs to be divided into two categories: democratic and authoritarian. Within the "authoritarian" category, China is seeing growing amounts of deliberation taking place thanks to the Internet. Click here for a live-blogged summary of that session.

Immediately following her presentation came talks by Xiao Qiang of China Digital Times and Ashley Esreay of Harvard's Fairbank Center and Middlebury. (Click here for the blog summary.) Xiao (whose paper will be made available on the circ.asia website in the coming week) described numerous examples of how the Internet is enabling the powerless to challenge the powerful. Esreay, in his paper titled Political Discourse on Chinese Blogs presented the findings of his empirical research. (See the WSJ writeup of his presentation here.) He compared content on blogs and newspapers discussing news events in 2006 and found that 61% percent of blog posts analyzed contained "some form of criticism", compared to 19% of all newspaper articles analyzed. 36% percent of blog posts contained "pluralism" or discussion of more than one point of view, while only 5% of newspaper articles did. Thus he was able to empirically confirm the unscientific impression of most people who follow the Chinese Internet: "Compared to the content of mainstream, traditional media, blogs are much more likely to contain opposing perspectives and criticism of the state." I found his findings about blogs as economic watchdogs particularly interesting: "Another important finding was that bloggers criticize corporations five times more frequently than journalists, whose role in democratic societies has been to protect the interests of the public from transgression."

Here's a breakdown of the kinds of criticism found in the Chinese blog posts (click to enlarge):

...Which brings me to Roland Soong's presentation on Day 1, A Psychographic Segment of Chinese Bloggers. Using survey data about Chinese Internet users collected by the media research company he works for, Roland "created a 3-segment solution based upon 32 psychographic statements about personality, motivation, society, culture, technology and so on by the K-means algorithm" Here is how Roland describes three different kinds of people now coexisting in the Chinese blogosphere:

Segment 1: Not interested in latest technology; not interested in latest fashion; not interested in other people's opinions; don't want to told what to do ... Who do they sound like? Fenqing (angry young people)?

Segment 2: Easily swayed by other people; want to be told what to do; first to buy latest technology; follow western lifestyle; lesser respect for tradition ... Who do they sound like? These are groupies who follow whatever is au courant as reported on the Internet.

Segment 3: Interested in a lifestyle filled with challenges, novelties and changes; more interested in spending time meaningfully than just making money; ready to pay extra for environment-friendly products; appreciate companies which support public causes; willing to volunteer personal time for good causes ...

The data was collected before the Sichuan Earthquake, but in his talk, Roland suggests that it is this third group who came into their own and made their presence felt in the aftermath of the earthquake. Deborah Fallows suggested that the earthquake may have been a "break through" moment for the way in which people use the Internet, as 9/11 was for people in the U.S.

In his Sunday afternoon talk, Isaac Mao repeated his core view that the Chinese people need free-thinking before they can have free speech. He also believes that the Internet is facilitating the evolution of an increasingly sophisticated "social brain", which he believes "will be the key in the future of this country."

USC graduate student Peter Marolt, in his PhD dissertation, is attempting to create a new conceptual framework to help us understand what is going on in China. He is working to map how "spaces of dissent" come into being, and what is the linkage between deliberation and action.

...Which brings me back to the beginning of my last post and Lokman Tsui's argument: that cold-war paradigms, based on the information environment and state-society relations in the countries that once comprised the Soviet Block, are not only hindering the outside world's understanding of China but are contributing to misguided policies. This is not to say one shouldn't support efforts by many people in China to obtain greater freedom of speech and the right to choose their leaders. Of course we should. The point is, strategies and approaches should be grounded in actual facts rather than over-simplified, romantic cold-war notions, or these efforts will not only fail but will also be rejected and denounced by the people you're ostensibly trying to help.

Next week at the Global Voices Summit in Budapest, we'll be spending the first day talking about how free speech advocacy can be improved and upgraded for the Internet age. I hope we'll be addressing some tough questions about what works - and what no longer works so well - when it comes to the strategies and tactics of today's human rights organizations and movements. What can the Chinese people do to convince Hu Jintao to pay attention to their concerns? Is there anything that well-meaning outsiders who care about China can constructively do to facilitate that process (or at least not hinder it) and if so what is it?

June 18, 2008

At last week's Chinese Internet Research Conference, much discussion of the "myths and realities" of the Chinese Internet revolved around images, metaphors, and paradigms.
In his award-winning paper titled The Great Firewall as Iron Curtain 2.0, UPenn PhD Student Lokman Tsui argued that "our use of the Great Firewall metaphor leads to blind spots that obscure and limit our understanding of internet censorship in the People’s Republic." (The paper and powerpoint will soon be posted on the Circ.Asia website.) It's a catchy term, combining "great wall" and "firewall" to characterize the Chinese government's effort to control the Internet, while at the same time conjuring a similar kind of image in our minds as the cold-war term "iron curtain."
Reliance on the term "great firewall of China" causes outsiders (especially Americans and Western Europeans) to think mistakenly that the main battle that needs to be fought in order to bring freedom of speech to the Chinese people is to "tear down that wall" - and enable all the good stuff (i.e. "truth") from the outside to get in. The reality, of course, is much more complicated. As anybody who studies (or experiences) Chinese Internet censorship can tell you, the system that filters or blocks external websites from internal view (which in itself is imperfect and full of holes) is only one part of a complex set of mechanisms - and social behaviors - that actually determine how much "free speech" Chinese internet users manage to have or not have. There is a vast system of internal censorship, mainly carried out by the private sector, as well as the seeding of online conversations to encourage them in certain directions and not others. There are also the nationalist "angry youths," there is cyber-bullying, there are flame wars, and "human flesh search engines" (cyber-vigilantes)... not to mention all kinds of porn and rampant distribution of copyrighted works. Among other things. Tsui argues that the "great firewall" metaphor has governed U.S. information policy to such a degree that it leads to policies that do not fit well with China's reality, and thus are unlikely to be successful if not counterproductive. He cites the Global Online Freedom Act and its predecessors as one particular example.

Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei.org prefers the term "net nanny" when discussing Chinese Internet censorship. (Photo courtesy "bonsaibutterfly.") He points out that this parental image is more in keeping with the way that Chinese authorities in charge of regulating the Internet describe their own jobs, and also in keeping with the way that many Chinese appear to view the system. As Deborah Fallows pointed out in her presentation, a recent survey of Chinese Internet users in seven major cities found that "over 80% of respondents say they think the internet should be managed or controlled, and in 2007, almost 85% say they think the government should be responsible for doing it." There is apparently a feeling among many Chinese Internet users that things are out of control, that there's much misinformation, violence, and porn, and that they would like their children as well as themselves to be protected from it to some degree. One of our presenters, Anne Cheung, a law professor at my own university, presented a long litany of nasty cyber-bullying cases that have taken place over the past year and advocated that ISP's need to get more nanny-like in order to bring cyber-bullying under control. (This proposal was not popular with bloggers in the room.)

This is a cartoon about the Internet battle between users of China.com and supporters of Southern Metropolis Daily over Chang Ping's opinion essay How To Find The Truth About Lhasa?. On the left, the slogans are: Freedom of speech; firmly support Southern Metropolis Daily; universal values; defecation ditch (referring to China.com as a collection of shitty angry young people); long live freedom and democracy; China.com is retarded. On the right, the slogans are: the elites are ruining the country; chase away the rightists at Southern Metropolis, the Chinese traitors at the KDnet forum and the running dogs at Tianya forum; oppose peaceful evolution; down with foreign lackies and compradores; democracy puts the nation in danger. The ocean is known as the "underwater" area in reference to netizens who only read and never write. The little island is for the spectators. The disclaimer under the title on top says: Purely for entertainment and one should not think that this was about any particular person.

In Roland's account of the session with Isaac, he repeats a point made by Isaac that "this drawing showed a static situation when in fact the situation was evolving dynamically over time. The fact that opinions were shifting meant that there was significant debate and interaction, and this drawing only provides one cross-section at a particular moment in time of an ongoing process." I quote Roland's descriptions and discussion of this picture at length for a reason: If your understanding of the Chinese Internet is based primarily on the "great firewall" metaphor, this picture - along with the online debates and flame-wars that inspired it - cannot compute. Depending on where you sit, the Chinese Internet may seem like a place where people are suppressed, censored, and controlled; but from some other people's vantage point it seems like a chaotic free-for-all. Or, if you can handle cognitive dissonance (which comes naturally if you've lived most of your life in mainland China), it's both at the same time...

Yet another metaphor was brought up in the final session of the conference: our "all star" panel of Chinese journalists and editors. Dr. Li Yonggang formerly of Nanjing and now at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, whose influential scholarly website "Horizons of Thought" was shut down after 13 months in operation, said he thinks the government's efforts to "manage" the Internet can be best described as a hydro-electric or water-management project. China's current crop of leaders come primarily from a technocratic, engineering background, and thus they apply their engineers' perspective to governance. If you approach Internet management in this way, the system has two main roles: managing water flows and distribution so that everybody who needs some gets some, and managing droughts and floods - which if not managed well will endanger the government's power.
It's a huge complex system with many moving parts, requiring a certain amount of flexibility - there's no way a government can have total control over water levels or water behavior. Depending on the season, you allow water levels in your reservoir to be higher or lower... but you try to prevent levels from getting above a certain point or below a certain point, and if they do you have to take drastic measures in order to prevent complete chaos. The managers of the system learn as they go along and adjust their behavior accordingly. It is a very resource-intensive enterprise in terms of people, money, and equipment, but while some functions are delegated to the private sector the government doesn't feel comfortable privatizing the whole thing, for fear of loss of control (and power). Li emphasized that with so many parts, and with the involvement of several different ministries, government bodies, and private companies, it would be wrong to view the behavior of this system as monolithic or centrally controlled. To some extent, the system once built has a life and logic of its own that propels it to continue, with a whole economic food chain of vested interests springing up around it.

What's tough for many Westerners to get their heads around is that on the Chinese Internet all of these metaphors can be true simultaneously. The "great firewall" is not a total myth - it's indeed a fact that China has the world's most sophisticated system of Internet filtering. But that is only one part of a very complex and often contradictory, confusing whole.

June 13, 2008

Day 2 of the Chinese Internet Research Conference is now underway. So far so good. Putting this thing together has been a lot of work, and there are always a few complainers, but overall the feedback has been very positive: people feel they're learning things and getting ideas that they've not gotten elsewhere.

This is primarily an academic conference, so it's different in tone and focus to most industry/commercial internet conferences or grassroots blogger conferences. The core of the conference is to give academics who conduct research on the Chinese Internet an opportunity to share and discuss their findings.

The CIRC conferences are held in a different university each year. (I blogged CIRC05 here and here; and CIRC06 here). This year we've done our best to connect the academic research with perspectives of non-academic "practitioners" (as people who work in the "real world" are called in the academy): bloggers, journalists, businesspeople, and politicians. So we have included several "roundtable" panels to bring those perspectives into the mix.

We're also fortunate to have Dave Lyons and John Kennedy blogging all the presentations on the CIRC blog. Other great conference-blogging can be found on the WSJ China blog (here, here, and here so far) and CNReviews (here, here, and here). Also see the CIRC2008 Twitter feed.

There's no point in my duplicating their hard work, but I will plan to post some overviews of what I learned from this conference when it's all over.

Held at a different university each year, the annual Chinese Internet Research Conference (CIRC) brings together academic scholars, policy analysts, industry leaders, journalists and legal practitioners from around the world. This year's conference comes to Hong Kong for the first time, hosted by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre.

This year's conference theme, "China and the Internet: Myths and Realities," seeks to separate fact from fiction about the Internet in China. As the attention of the world will be focused upon the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games, this timely event will explore the political, social, economic, cultural and institutional aspects of Internet development in China.

Panels of scholars will present the latest empirical research as well as qualitative and critical studies of the meaning of information technologies in the Chinese world. The programme also includes roundtable discussions and presentations by some of the people who are shaping the future of China's internet: Chinese bloggers, internet entrepreneurs, journalists and industry experts.

With simultaneous translation in English and Putonghua, the event will be of great interest to anybody who studies Internet developments in China.